Changing the World

May 19, 2007

Within the first couple of days that Kelly and I were in India, I became
painfully aware of the fact that my little job managing a team in India
doing IT stuff for back end business processing at a large corporation
was relatively meaningless. Insignificant.

That was an interesting conclusion to reach. I’d gone from being a poor
kid who made a meager musician’s living in Memphis to being a powerful
(by Indian standards) executive, running a software center for a fortune
10 company. I was leader to eventually over two hundred people and had
regular dealings with Indian government officials and CEOs of
neighboring companies. Kelly and I lived in a palatial house on a street
lined with government leaders for the state of Karnataka.

But every single day, on the way to the office where I would play
another game of business Monopoly, we would stop at one of the many
beggar-lined red lights in the city where a young girl carrying a dusty,
naked baby would come tap on the windows of the car and motion to her
mouth. We would hear the moaning of the lepers on the corners—-people
too sick to stand at the car, so they had to moan to make up for the
lack of an attention-getting tapping sound. People whose limbs were
amputated or mutilated and usually covered with bandages.

It’s pretty easy to let yourself go numb to this kind of thing.
Especially when you’re not in a car, and they’re chasing you down the
street and—~~God forbid—~~touching you. You just want to get
away. You just want to go about your business. The people become pests
to you. An annoying part of the scenery. An obstacle.

Kelly and I now live in Colorado. Near Boulder. We’re right at the base
of the mountains. When we moved here (a year and a half ago) we said
something like this: “Do you think people who live here ever get tired
of looking at that view? Do they ever forget how amazing this place is?
I hope we don’t. Let’s not. Let’s vow to not get numb to it.”

That’s the same thing you have to do in India with the poverty and the
sickness. You have to resolve not to go numb to it. Even if you’re a
compassionate person. Like the mountains in Boulder, the constant
landscape on a daily commute in India is decorated with images of
poverty and sickness.

The amazing thing about each one of these beggars you see on the
street—-and there are a lot of them—-is that I have enough
money that, without too much effort I could completely change one of
these people’s lives. I’m not saying I’m rich. But in Indian terms I am.
And at this level of the Indian economy, I’m like a king. So knowing
that, it becomes difficult to buy a computer or a car or a house or a
really nice piece of clothing or a big meal without thinking about the
difference that money could make in a family’s life somewhere else in
the world. Even in the US, as it turns out.

Since leaving India, I’ve changed my focus a bit. Instead of working
within the confines of a single company, I’ve turned my attention
outward. I’ve written a couple of books, spoken at quite a few
conferences. Written some open source software. That kind of thing. I
believe that at least one of my books has had a somewhat profound impact
on many of its readers. This is nice.

I’m sure that this change was at least partially inspired by the
epiphany of insignificance which came over me on the Indian streets. But
now, several years later, I can look back and see that if I were to idle
at one of those street lights now, sitting low in the back seat
listening to the tapping, I would realize that my accomplishments still
pale in the harsh light of reality. What I’m doing now matters more than
what I was doing then in the same way that eating 95% of a cheeseburger
will make you less fat than eating the whole thing.

We in the Ruby on Rails community like to get gung ho about being on the
leading edge of change. We even like to say the phrase
“change
the world” in reference to the things we’re doing with the framework
and the applications we’re building with it. It’s not just us tooting
our own horns either. Business 2.0 named David Heinemeier Hansson one of
their top 50 people “who matter now” last spring, citing world-changing
ideas as a major criterion for inclusion.

It’s fun and feels good to think of yourself as a world changer. But
every time I hear the phrase, I think about those street corners and
back alleys, and I feel a little cheap.

The easiest way to really change the world is to find a charity you
believe in and start sending some money. We Americans have a lot of
extra money, so it’s not too hard. In fact, I think it’s too easy. I’m
not saying we shouldn’t do it, but that at least for me, financial
contributions are so easy and faceless that I will forget about them.
They also have very limited impact. Even if I were to donate 10% of my
annual income, the net possible impact is limited to that amount of
money. That’ll help an organization toward its goals, but I think I have
a lot more to offer.

The real treasure I have to offer is my passion. I almost said “my
time”, but I’m not talking about picking up garbage on the side of the
road for an hour a week. I’m talking about “flow time”. Passion-infused
time that grows into the evenings and early mornings because I’m on a
roll and I just can’t stop. I’ve been known to do some really smart
stuff when I’m in that kind of mode. And, of course, when I say “I”, I
mean me and my friends and family. The people I know. You too (if you’re
not already in that group). We’re all capable of actually changing
things if we dedicate ourselves to really changing things.

Back to this Rails thing again. If you really can develop applications
ten times faster with Rails than with other technologies, and you really
can develop them so fast that throw-away applications are even OK (you
can), Rails itself makes for an excellent tool to facilitate real
change. The scope is limited, but where people have brilliant ideas that
involve making a positive difference to the world using web
applications, passionate Rails developers can get them to their goals
faster than ever before.

I have some specific ideas about how I can start at least trying to make
a real difference using my skill set (programming—-these days in
Ruby/Rails). They’re half-baked so I’ll go into them a different day.
But…

Instead of being a community known for being arrogant and
self-congratulatory, imagine if we took this energy, passion, and (at
the risk of sounding arrogant) raw badassedness and
actually started changing the world?The Rails
Guidebook was an excellent start, but it wasn’t as infectious as we
might have hoped. If we can manage to easily raise
thousands
of dollars to write documentation for Rails or to have a designer
create a logo, surely we can turn this machine toward some tangibly
world-beneficial cause.